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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalter - 06:21pm Jun 3, 2001 EST (#4471 of 4473)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

The Innocence of Pearl Harbor by JOHN W. DOWER http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/03/opinion/03DOWE.html

contains powerful, useful language and ideas, referring to the movie, Pearl Harbor as representation:

When Pearl Harbor is bombed, the attack force passes over a field of youngsters playing baseball (a scene featured in the films advertisements). The camera follows the explosives to their human victims and then dwells there, interminably, amid the carnage. Although the Doolittle raid killed about 50 civilians, including some schoolchildren, we never see this or hear of it. Nor are we told, in the films epilogue, how inexorable was the terrible logic of the war: Pearl Harbor leading to the Doolittle raid, and this in turn to the firebombing of over 60 Japanese cities, culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The death toll from the atomic bombs alone was nearly 100 times that at Pearl Harbor.

Payback, many Americans will respond. But this does not get us very far when it comes to trying to convey the nightmarish insanity of war in our time, where the line between combatant and noncombatant has been eliminated and that between victim and victimizer so often dissolves.

. . . . .

How different it would be if on both sides of the Pacific, we could turn Prime Minister Higashikunis wish around and simultaneously remember both Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima (and all that came both before and in between) not as a trade-off, but as a tragedy. An enormously powerful, humanistic film waits to be made here. But who would dare do this? Who would go see it?

The people of the world need to be able to appreciate the hypothetical movie Dower speaks of. We need to step back from horrors that came to be considered normal during WWII - - - horrors that were magnified, almost beyond belief, in the nuclear terror -- horrors that need to be ended, so that the world will survive, and so that we can be more decent.

It is not all right to blow up innocent bystanders, who happen to be loosely labeled enemies -- whether it is done by a suicide bomber - or a button pusher -- and the horror is worse as the numbers of people killed increase. We now live in a world where, under easily imaginable circumstance, the all of humanity could be reduced to rotting unburied corpses.

We need to step back from that horror -- which will take some careful negotiation, and straightforward action.

rshowalter - 06:34pm Jun 3, 2001 EST (#4472 of 4473)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

For more than fifty years, and especially since the late 1950s, weve had large groups of people knowingly acting to make it possible to reduce large populations, almost all innocent in military terms, into masses of rotting unburied corpses.

There is no reason to think that the US population, or the Russian population, was in any substantial doubt about what was being done, and threatened, by our military forces. Though the ignorance about details was enormous and important.
MD797: rshowalter 2/27/01 6:27pm

It is worth pointing out a practical sense in which nuclear war is entirely, vividly real - a sense in which crimes and massive injuries have already happened. They have happened, over and over, in great detail, in the imaginations of people. And those imaginations have been made vivid, and reinforced repeatedly, by careful and detailed rehearsals.
MD798: rshowalter 2/28/01 2:47pm

When we negotiate and speak "abstractly" as if fear, and distrust aren't essential parts of our nuclear impasse, we may feel that we are being "mature" and "polite" but we are also being impractical. The sensible thing is to acknowledge the fear, distrust, and other emotions that are there. And deal with these emotions as they are, in ways that work for all the human beings involved.

There are good reasons to be serious here, and to check facts , and make decisions in due light to the best information and logic available.

The logic is compelling -- we need to find ways to make peace -- so that it works, between old enemies who are now "friends".

rshowalter - 07:55pm Jun 3, 2001 EST (#4473 of 4473)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

And we need right answers -- not wishful thinking carried to ridiculous extremes to justify exorbitant funding of far-fetched, back-of-the-envelope Buck Rogers schemes that could not stand up to public, competent, clear cross-examination.

Item:

Errant Rocket Dooms Trial of New Jet in NASA Test by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/03/science/03JET.html

" LOS ANGELES, June 2 (AP) — NASA aborted an attempt to set a speed record for a nonrocket aircraft, blowing up an unmanned experimental X-43A scramjet just seconds after the plane was dropped from the belly of a B-52. . . ."

This test, which NASA just failed, is thousands or millions of times easier than the tests a real missile defense system would have to pass consistently.

An attempt to do a first flight test on a scramjet under continuous development of 40 years failed (or was surreptitiously aborted.)

Some people say "with enough money, there are no real problems in missile defense" -- but masses of engineering experience, reinforced today, stand dead against that postion.

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